Plays of Charles Dickens

Joanna Hofer-Robinson is an Assistant Professor in the English and Comparative Literary Studies department at the University of Warwick. Her recent publications include Dickens and Demolition (2018) and Sensation Drama, 1860—1880: An Anthology (2019, co-edited with Beth Palmer), as well as articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century drama and Dickens studies. Pete Orford is Course Director of the MA in Charles Dickens Studies at the University of Buckingham, and Academic Advisor to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. His recent publications include The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens (2023) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel and our endless attempts to end it (2018).

Dickens was one of the most theatrical of novelists, as the editors of this splendid edition make clear, and yet his plays have been relatively disregarded. With this publication we can now, at last, give full attention to Dickens the playwright, his scripts and their textual variants, accompanied by a fresh, incisive and substantial scholarly introduction and a selection of contemporary illustrations. The editors should be rewarded in their hopes that this publication will promote new efforts to stage productions of some of these zestful plays.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsNote on the TextIntroductionSuggested Further ReadingThe PlaysThe Strange GentlemanThe Village CoquettesIs She His Wife? or, Something SingularThe LamplighterMr Nightingale’s DiaryThe Frozen DeepNo ThoroughfareAppendicesI. O’ThelloII. The Patrician’s Daughter (Prologue)III. The Elder Brother (Prologue)IV. Closing scene to Animal MagnetismV. The Lighthouse (Prologue)VI. The Housekeeper (Prologue)References